Kent And Ralph At The Architecture Workshop

RalphJohnson arrived late at BruceAnderson's first ArchitectureHandbookWorkshop at OOPSLA'91. He had spent the morning giving a tutorial on frameworks, so he wasn't sure what was happening. The group had spent the morning writing a table of contents for the Architecture Handbook, and conflicting visions of the future were in the air.

KentBeck's vision of the future was patterns. When Bruce told the group to work in pairs to write a entry for the Architecture Handbook, Kent grabbed Ralph and said "I've always wanted to write a set of patterns for using HotDraw. Let's do it!" Ralph agreed. Kent was happy to have such a compliant team. They spent an hour or so writing down 8 or 9 patterns for using HotDraw, and then coerced NormKerth into acting as their test subject. They taught him the patterns, and then when it came time to present their entry to the group, they had Norm show it off by designing a dataflow diagram editor, in real-time and unrehearsed. Both Ralph and Kent thought it was a fabulous success.

A month later, Ralph looked at the patterns and thought they looked bare and feeble. Nobody would understand them unless they were better explained. He couldn't understand why he had been so excited a month before, but trusting the memory of his enthusiasm, he fleshed out the few lines into a few pages, and started circulating them, first to his students and then to the HotDraw mailing list. He tried to get Kent's attention (though probably not hard enough), but Kent seemed to be busy with other things. As he got feedback and added examples, the paper grew longer. Eventually he submitted it to OOPSLA, and the result was DocumentingFrameworksWithPatterns. A year or so after that he learned that Kent would have liked to have been a coauthor, and he felt bad that he had been so rude. This didn't permanently damage their friendship, as can be seen by PatternsGenerateArchitectures.

CategoryPatternHistory CategoryPatternStories?